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296 ever, and it seemed as though there must always be more Afghans than room for them on the railway. The Bengali station-master, who greeted us as old acquaintances when we returned safely to his theatrical platform and its wild war drama, stood by our window and talked, and heeded this riot and the mingled roars in Pushtu no more than the ripples of the Indus on the stones below. Six-foot ruffians, with rage and hate distorting their countenances, ramped the platform and flung themselves in heaps before each third-class door, each man with enough extra cloth flapping, bagging, flying loose and trailing after him to clothe two other men in European patterns. Each bawled and beat the air like a mad-man, screaming rage and defiance at the earlier occupants of compartments where not another foot nor elbow could be insinuated by the most determined of these hairy giants. And still the Bengali talked gently on, airily admitting that the Afghans were a very bad lot. "But Abdurrahman can manage them as no one else can. They all fear him. When he dies we will have the war."

"Tell me about the Khyber Pass. How did you get permission to go there? What did you go for?" bluntly asked a German cavalry officer when we had returned to table d'hôte circles at Lahore. He cross-examined me as to every civil, social, military, and geographic fact that might have come under my observation. "You wanted to see the live Pathans because Herr Kipling has written? and to see where Alexander came through?" We charged the uhlan with wishing to see where